The Heart Goes Last is another speculative novel. I can't quite say post-apocalyptic, because the disaster is less extreme than in Oryx and Crake, and there is no regime change, as in The Handmaid's Tale. Nonetheless, the catastrophe in the background is a financial crisis, and those are plenty apocalyptic for many people. Our two main characters, Charmaine and Stan, have lost their home and are living, if you can call it that, in their car. Charmaine hears of a new pilot program with job training and persuades Stan to check it out.
The pilot program is the twin cities of Positron and Consilience. Consilience is a small town with a '50s vibe where Charmaine and Stan can move out of their car and into a home with a real bed. The catch is that every other month they leave the comfy house to their “Alternates” and spend four weeks in the Positron prison. Everyone has a job in both places, prison and town, so everyone is fully employed.
Before officially signing on, Stan visits his aptly named criminal brother Con, short for Conor, and Conor warns him that no one comes out of that place alive.
I have to say I did not enjoy this book as much as Atwood’s other speculative work. I didn't find the world building as absorbing or detailed and I didn't like the characters as much. Granted, the MaddAddam series had three books in which to do the world building. But even if we just consider the second book, The Year of the Flood, I found the rituals and characters in the God's Gardeners community much more convincing than the faceless inhabitants of the twin cities. I also found the MaddAddam characters, especially Zeb and Toby, three-dimensional, whereas I found Stan to be a “Flat Stanley,” and Charmain no deeper.
*Spoilers ahead*
We do get a couple of tantalizing glimpses into Charmain’s childhood, but no definitive revelation. Was she molested, and blamed for it? Does this explain her willingness to perform the gruesome prison job of “putting down” the less tractable prisoners in her own gentle way, so they suffer less than she did?
This book veers into the sexual in a couple unusual ways. One might think that when the couple returns to a more or less normal home that their marriage would resume as usual. However, they both become sexually obsessed with an Alternate, someone who occupies the house while they are in prison.
In MaddAddam, the Scales and Tails strip club is more or less what we would see today, with some extra attention to costumes. However, one of the big money-making secrets of the twin cities project is prostibots, or sex robots, customizable of course. And beyond that, top dog bad guy Ed is working with a shady company in Las Vegas to transform a person through laser brain surgery into a sex slave. The person's memories of prior love objects are erased, and they imprint upon the first face they see when they awake from surgery, preferably the person who ordered up the memory wipe. This just seems kind of gratuitous and less plausible Atwood’s usual fare.
But to end on a positive note, this is an interesting critique of the American prison system and its disproportionately large role in the economy. Corporations are already running prisons for private financial benefit. Take away the laser sex slaves and it reminds me of 1984, a gritty and and in some ways realistic take on a totalitarian future, with a hapless couple caught in the center, forced to make impossible choices.
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